The Night He Finally Chose Us
He missed his shift at six. The plant docked him the day. We laughed about it later, that the thing Lorraine had been so sure would ruin us, one missed morning at the line, cost us ninety dollars and nothing else, and that the thing she was sure was nothing could have cost us the world.
Lorraine came to see Ruthie three days later. She called first. It rang in our kitchen like a strange new bell, that call, and I almost did not know what to do with a Lorraine who asked if it was a good time. She knocked at the door even though her hand surely still remembered the key she no longer had. She brought a casserole, because she is still herself, and she sat on our couch and she held my daughter, and before she left she stood in the doorway and she said to me, not easily, the words costing her something, “Peggy was it. The nurse. She was right, and I was not. I’ve been thinking on it.”
It was not an apology, not a full one. I did not get I’m sorry for four years, Dana, I never got that. But I got Peggy was right and I was not, from a woman who had never in my hearing said she was not right about anything, and I took it, because I have learned that sometimes the whole of what a person can give you is smaller than what you are owed, and you can either hold out for the full sum forever or you can take what is offered and build with it. I took it. I am building with it.
Things are different now. Lorraine calls before she comes. She knocks. She has opinions about the children’s medicine and the thermometer and she keeps most of them to herself now, and the ones she does not keep to herself she offers as opinions and not as commands, and I let most of them roll off because I can afford to be gracious now that I am not being erased. She is a better grandmother than she was, and I think, in the strange way of these things, she is happier, because a person who cannot hear no cannot really hear yes either, and now that she has heard both she seems more like a woman and less like a weather front.
And Caleb. I married a good man, I always knew that, but I married a man who had a groove worn in him so deep he fell into it without feeling the fall, and I spent four years certain I would spend forty more sitting alone in rooms he had been turned out of. The night our daughter seized on the living room rug is the worst night of my life, and I would not wish it on anyone, and it is also the night my husband climbed up out of that groove in front of three nurses and chose us with his own mouth, out loud, where it could not be taken back.